Winning the Best Retail/Leisure Project of the Year at the Offsite Awards 2018, the Holiday Inn Express (HIEx) hotel in Trafford City, Manchester is a 220-bedroom hotel constructed using offsite volumetric modular methods.
The hotel, located next to Manchester’s EventCity venue on a 1.75 acre site, was a joint venture between Topland, Marick and Mill Lane Estates and is the first Holiday Inn Express ‘Generation 4’ in the UK to be built using a modular construction process. All 220 bedrooms have been constructed under factory conditions, creating steel-based, volumetric modules complete with fully factory-finished interior furniture and fixtures and fittings, including carpets, curtains, wallpaper and full-height windows. Architect, Chapman Taylor’s Manchester studio, worked alongside the main contractor, Bowmer & Kirkland to see the modules stacked on top of each other without the need for additional supporting structures, to enable fast installation onsite.
Each module consisted of two bedrooms and a section of corridor, with all of the 220 bedrooms placed on site in less than three weeks, ready for external cladding to commence. The fixtures and fittings, having been produced and installed in a controlled factory environment, were of a very high standard – inspected and signed off before being delivered. This meant that quality assurance was in place before the modules took their place in the finished building.
The nature of branded hotels such as Holiday Inn Express requires bedrooms to be relatively uniform, so volumetric construction was ideal for the client’s purposes – they received a superior, factory-installed quality of floorspace, furniture and fittings at a much lower cost and in a greatly reduced timeframe. The external envelope was applied once the modules were in place, using pre-finished rain-screen cladding and single-ply roofing systems, which were fixed to specific areas of the module to maintain an airtight seal.
Working collaboratively with other specialist consultants appointed by the main contractor, Bowmer & Kirkland, Chapman Taylor developed a fully co-ordinated BIM model to inform the detailed design and enable the offsite works to commence in-line with the ambitious programme. Employing this type of offsite modular design required a completely new approach to the traditionally linear design process. Driven by the leadin times associated with the offsite works, the design team were required to fix the details and specifications of the guestroom finishes long before scheduling out the accommodation which was to be provided at ground floor level. Employing volumetric modular construction meant that overall construction time and costs were massively reduced, allowing the client to begin trading much more quickly.
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